Apple Crisp

I had an apple crisp failure last weekend. The dry, bland concoction that came out of my oven tasted more like an space food approximation of apple crisp than the quintessential autumn dessert.

Refusing to be defeated by one of the simplest fruit dishes out there, I looked to Martha Stewart to correct my baking errors for a second attempt. It turns out I used the wrong type of apple, my sugar levels were way off, and my use of melted butter made the baked topping soft. For the second try, I used Gala apples, upped the sugar, and cut cold butter cubes into the dry ingredients. After an hour in the oven, it came out bubbling and golden brown. Perfect.

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Chicken B’stilla

It’s Meat Pie Season, people. It’s time to embrace the dropping temperatures and revel in the glory of slow-cooked meats, flaky crusts, hearty gravies, and vegetables of all kinds. Many people celebrate the season by making classics like chicken pot pie or shepherd’s pie, but I’d like to propose another option: a chicken-based (or pigeon-based) Moroccan meat pie called a b’stilla. Instead of a traditional pie crust, it employs flaky phyllo dough, and because it’s Moroccan, the filling offers savory and sweet flavors like cinnamon, honey, lemon, saffron, coriander, cilantro, and more. It may sound strange, but I promise it all comes together.

I found the recipe for the b’stilla in Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table and didn’t adapt it at all, so you can check it out in this handy Google Books preview version of her fantastic cookbook. You can also find photos from and lessons learned during my pie preparation after the jump. Continue Reading →

Triple-Chocolate Cookies with a Kick

These cookies started as triple threats of unsweetened cocoa powder, semisweet chocolate chips, and milk chocolate chips in a recipe from Real Simple. I made them once following the exact recipe and they were good, but I wanted to make something a little different for my second batch.

Cut to the spice rack. I pulled down the cinnamon, ground cloves, ground ginger, and chili powder to add to the intense chocolate flavor. I didn’t find the amount of spices to be overwhelming, but you may want to tweak them to meet your tastes. Also, keep an eye on the clock while baking. Just one extra minute in the oven can mean the difference between serving cookies with perfect, chewy centers and cookies that could double as miniature hockey pucks. I let a batch go a few minutes too long, and pressed for time, I had to bring them to an office potluck, my head hung in shame. I’m lucky no one cracked a tooth. Continue Reading →

A Return to the Kitchen: Beef Stew

I’ve abandoned this blog and my kitchen for far too long. The spring and summer were a blur of wedding planning, work, and social events with little time left for making interesting meals from scratch. I was also trying to drop a few pounds for my wedding day, so I spent most of May and June eating salads, lean proteins, and not much else. They didn’t make for prime blogging material. “Bake the chicken breast at 350° for thirty minutes and you’re done! Pair with a lightly-dressed salad and repeat all steps, every night until you might strangle the next person you see with a burger and fries.”

With wedding planning over and most food groups reincorporated into my diet, I’ve returned to the kitchen inspired by a boatload of new kitchen gadgets and cookware from our fabulous wedding guests and a desire to improve my rusty cooking skills. The first major dish I made was a beef stew based on Alice Water’s recipe in The Art of Simple Food. I spent a Sunday afternoon chopping carrots and potatoes, browning beef, and taking swigs of the red wine that would be used to deglaze the bottom of the pan. The apartment was filled with the glorious smell of slow-cooking meat and I was reminded of everything I’d been missing for the past few months. Continue Reading →

Registering for the Apartment Kitchen

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Putting together a wedding registry is a daunting task for any engaged couple, but for those with microsized apartment kitchens and no available storage space to speak of, it’s especially tough. There are just so many things to want, but few items that will actually fit. So, as Ramsey and I wandered through kitchen and home goods stores with pens, paper, and bar code scanners in hand this past Saturday, I had to keep my kitchen cookware/appliance/gadget/tool lust in check. Will we really use a juicer? Maybe for a week, but never again. Ice cream maker? Definitely not. Is a berry strainer any better than a regular strainer? Probably not. After five hours and three stores, we ended up with a list of essentials that are upgraded versions of the items currently in our kitchen (along with a few new items), including:

10″ and 12″ frying pans
2 and 4 qt. sauce pans
3.5 quart and 7.5 qt. dutch ovens
A real, sharp, and functional chef’s knife (along with a utility and bread knife)
Baking sheets
Fancy pie plate
Quality silverware
Serving plates and platters
Matching dinner plates, salad plates, and bowls
Exhaustion

ramseyregistry

Of all three stores we visited, I have to say that The Brooklyn Kitchen was the best registering experience. They provided a folder with suggested registry items, gave us a personal tour of their cookware and knife selections, and were not pushy at all. Added bonus: temporary tattoos in the registry folder!

Roasted Beet Salad

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Root vegetables are budget conscious cooks’ best friends. They’re cheap, store well, and are (usually) full of flavor. Beets are one of my favorite varieties, so when temperatures dipped into the teens last week, I thought it was the perfect time to roast a few. I combined them with roasted sweet potatoes, dried cranberries, and mixed greens to create salads for lunch at work.

If you’ve never roasted beets before, it’s a simple process. Simply wash, roast, and peel. A beet roasting guide with photos and a recipe for a roasted beet salad can be found after the jump. Continue Reading →

Frugal Dining

Between now and July 9th, I need to save a whole lot of cash for my wedding. It’s not easy since I live in the most expensive city in the United States, I want to maintain some semblance of a social life, and—let’s face it—I like nice things. I enjoy going out to dinner, ordering cocktails with expansive lists of ingredients at bars, buying overpriced sandwiches for lunch during the work week, and downloading books to my Kindle with reckless abandon. In my mind, happiness is often equal to comfort and convenience.

But this life of middle-class late-twentysomething luxury is no more. As I stated in my New Year’s Resolutions for 2011, I’m cooking four nights a week and bringing my lunch to work at least four days a week. The occasional meal out is reserved for meeting up with friends or an inexpensive item to-go ($4 falafel!). I also set a strict weekly budget for socializing and personal expenses, but in order to stick to this budget and cooking plan, I needed to come up with some strategies for eating well on the cheap. Continue Reading →

New Year’s Resolutions 2011

I’ve posted my New Year’s Resolutions online since 2005. As I explain every year, it’s an exercise in personal motivation. If I tell the world (or the small handful of people that visit this site) that I’m going to do something, then hell, I may just do it.

2010 Resolution Review:
1. Continue to increase creative output, and if enough suitable work is ready, submit to at least two publications per month. Writing-wise, I kept this up for the first few months of 2010. I wrote a bit more, submitted to a few journals (nothing published), but I lost momentum as projects at work bled into my evening hours. Art-wise, I took a watercolor class and produced about eight paintings. Overall, not a total success.
2. Maintain a daily journal. Also kept a journal up for a little while in 2010, but ultimately stopped.
3. Increase the balance in my savings account. Well, I do have a savings account, but those funds are wedding-only.
4. Take care of myself, both physically and mentally. This means regular check-ups at the doctor and maintaining a healthy work/life balance. I now have a primary care physician and dentist. I also had my wisdom teeth removed after years of putting it off. The health work/life balance was lost mid-year, but has recently been regained.
5. Attend more cultural events in New York. Overall, this was a success. The average was probably 2-3 events or excursions per month. (The Spider-Man musical counts, right?)
6. Go on a culinary adventure at least once a month. Not accomplished. There were adventures, but not on a monthly basis.
7. Cook dinner or have leftovers four days a week. Related: Bring lunch to work four days a week. I met the cooking requirement almost every week, but rarely brought my lunch to work. Lunch usually consisted of a cheap salads from the glorified bodega by the office, and on stressful days (see: most of last year), a box of junior mints.
8. Post here at least twice a week, ideally three times a week. Oh, definitely not.
9. Redesign my personal website. Done.
10. Go on weekend adventures. Montreal? Jersey? Boston? Anything’s game. Accomplished. A few weekend adventures included trips to Thomas Edison’s house, Teddy Roosevelt’s house, apple picking, the Jersey Shore, and more.

Resolutions for 2011
1. Finish planning the wedding and maintain my sanity.
2. Stick to a strict budget to save for aforementioned wedding. No credit card debt.
3. Related to three: Cook four nights a week. Bring lunch at least four days a week. (This starts next week with the arrival of my ridiculous bento-style lunchbox from Amazon. I may have also purchased a backup set of red inserts with my Christmas gift cads, because god forbid I carry/wear/eat out of anything that isn’t red and/or black.)
4. Post on Apartment Dining at least twice a week.
5. Read fifty books. I’ll be tracking my progress on GoodReads. (This one is inspired by my friend Alison’s quest to read 100 books in 2011. Check out her list of favorite books from 2010.)
6. Learn how to draw.
7. As finances allow, attend more cultural events in New York.
8. Document more. The next year is going to be fun, stressful, crazed, and momentous.
9. Maintain a work/life balance. Work in the evenings when it’s needed, but devote more time to creative pursuits.

Looking for Classic New York

Ramsey and I will mark our fifth anniversary in less than two weeks and we want to have a classic New York dining experience. We’re not looking for anything that’s too expensive (less than $40 for an entree is ideal), but we want to be dolled-up and not look out of place. We’re leaning towards Raoul’s in SoHo, but I’m open to suggestions. If you know of any classic New York spots that don’t require reservations months in advance, let me know in the comments.

Irish Soda Bread

Hi there. I should start this post by acknowledging things have been very quiet here since late February. Between having limited internet access at my apartment for the past three weeks due to shoddy Road Runner service, long days at work, and a minor boyfriend medical emergency, I haven’t been cooking or posting much. I have been documenting my existence with daily photos and uploading them when I can. I’ve also been eating a lot of sandwiches, my favorite of which has been this week’s melted brie, apple, and blackberry jam on toasted whole wheat.

But let’s get down to the business at hand. It’s St. Patrick’s Day. You may be reading this through Guinness goggles; perhaps you have a bottle of Jameson nearby. You may not be drinking and just wearing a wool sweater, or still giggling to yourself about the suckers you saw wearing wool sweaters on a day that hit sixty degrees.

I have no sweater or booze. Instead, I have a large chunk of crispy, sugar-topped Irish soda bread. This is the first soda bread I’ve made that couldn’t double as a doorstop or weight training tool and I owe it to this recipe from Epicurious. It’s not be the most traditional recipe, but it was a hit this morning at work, and I’ve consumed half of a second loaf by myself. Its scone-like consistency and flavor may make it a staple in my breakfast bread rotation. The only issue is tracking down buttermilk and having plenty of raisins on hand.

Even though the holiday is almost over, give the recipe a shot and enjoy a slice on Sunday morning with a cup of tea.